Hon. Henry Shippen

biography

Hon. Henry Shippen, son of Colonel Joseph Shippen, in the Provincial army and secretary of the Provincial council of Pennsylvania in 1762 until the Revolution, was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1788., and was educated for the bar. In the war of 1812 he organized a company of volunteer cavalry, in which James Buchanan, afterward President of the United States, was a private. Mr. Shippen was made captain and ordered on duty September 5, 1812, by Governor Simon Snyder, afterward first aide-de-camp to Major General Nathaniel Watson, commanding Pennsylvania Volunteers at Baltimore, September 16, 1814. (See volume XII of the Roll of Pennsylvania Volunteers in the war of 1812-14, page 18.)

In 1817 he married Elizabeth Wallis Evans, a granddaughter of Colonel Evan Evans of Chester county, who commanded a battalion at the battle at Trenton, New Jersey, and participated in the battle of Brandywine in September, 1777. In 1819 he moved to Huntingdon, where he practiced law and became a member of the legislature. In 1825 he was appointed president judge of the sixth judicial district of Pennsylvania, then comprising the counties of Crawford, Erie, Warren, Venango and Mercer. He moved to Meadville in 1825, where he lived and served the district until his death, in 1839. It is said that he never had but one decision reversed by the higher court during all his years of service.

He was the great-grandson of Edward Shippen, the first mayor of Philadelphia, and nephew of Edward Shippen, chief justice of Pennsylvania. His father, Joseph Shippen, was in Braddock’s army in 1755, and at the taking of Fort Duquesne. He was afterward colonel.

Our county and its people: a historical and memorial record of Crawford County, Pennsylvania by Samuel P. Bates, 1899, page 708.